10 jaw-dropping hotel suites

The Raj Palace Grand Heritage Hotel

Jaipur,/ IndiaFelt like a royalty

If you want to catch a brief glimpse of what being royalty feels like, make Raj Palace your next tourist stop. Jaipur, the Pink City, definitely transports one into a royal past, so why not live in that past for a few days? The experience begins with their signature line, “Welcome to the Raj Palace”. It seems like an innocuous welcome, but each time you return from sightseeing ventures, you get an increasing feeling that you are returning, not to a hotel, but to your own palace.
Raj Palace is visually stunning with a vast central courtyard, with the main building rising palatially at the far end. The rooms are themselves situated around smaller courtyards featuring decorated marble floors and assorted fountains. The décor within the rooms is at once regal and rustic, in keeping with the theme. While Raj Palace has worked in all the modern conveniences, it is not going to be a vanilla, chain hotel experience. For instance, in place of centralized heating and cooling, the rooms have individual air-conditioners and space heaters.
What separates Raj Palace from any hotel I have been at is the service. “Outstanding” would be inadequate to describe it. Every request is attended to promptly and with a smile. Except, the staff go a step beyond, constantly seeing where a small action on their part would make your stay a bit more pleasurable. You could be looking for salt or sugar at the breakfast table and the waiter is at your side asking what you need. We wanted our rooms to be a little warmer, so an additional space heater was provided. Our request for hot water bottles to be placed in our beds only had to be made once – they were there every night.
Our thanks to the Raj Palace staff for this unique experience, one we would whole heartedly recommend to one and all. The only recommendations for improvement would be replacing the bathtubs, which are showing signs of age and installing a fuller shower screen to prevent a wet bathroom floor.Felt
Stayed: January 2014, traveled as a couple